In Elsbeth, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) works as a consultant for the New York Police Department, making use of her very particular observations about situations to help identify killers and solve crimes, all delivered with her singular plucky energy and very direct nature.
Awards Buzz spoke with Preston about whether she feels like she’s become one with her character, solving murders before she knows for sure who did it:
“A lot of times, when I get the script, I will skip the murder part and then I will read so I can understand every single thought process that Elsbeth has, and then I’ll go back and read the murder to see if there was something that I missed or maybe suggest to the writers, gosh, I think maybe we could pump this up a little more because I didn’t quite follow that, or how would I know that? When we get into shooting, oftentimes when we do what we like to call the gotcha scene, which is the big sum-up that Elsbeth does for the murderer right before they get arrested, I will make sure that the director and everyone who was there when they shot the murder walks me through exactly how they shot it, because physically I often do a lot of things that were very similar to what the murderer did. Sometimes we have to work backwards. Sometimes I do the gotcha scene before they’ve filmed the murder. We have amazing people on our crew, so it somehow seems to all come together.”
She celebrated the official switch for this show from drama to comedy with awards bodies:
“I’m all for it. When I found out in season one that we were in the drama category, I was disappointed. I wanted to be in the conversation for awards and I wanted that for CBS as well, but I knew that there was no way our show would be able to compete with Shōgun and The Handmaid’s Tale. Those things are just completely different than what we are. We are decidedly very light and smart and fun and my character is rooted in comedy. That’s in her DNA since day one. She was brought on for that express purpose, to bring some levity and some surprise to those universes. So once we got into the rhythm and everyone started realizing that we were really leaning into that, it just made sense for everyone to campaign for that switch. And, luckily, after three seasons of doing what I like to call Elsbits, all of the awards categories agreed that we are definitely a comedy. So that’s fun. The good news is the Critics’ Choice Awards immediately nominated us! So even if nothing else happens beyond that, we made the right choice by campaigning to switch.”
Watch the video to hear how she reflects back on her time on two shows from earlier in her career: True Blood and Person of Interest.
The first three seasons of Elsbeth are streaming on Paramount+. Season four returns this fall on CBS.
